


Apocalypse When?

by ballantine



Category: due South
Genre: 2030s Era, Alternate Universe - Future, Climate Change, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, Reunions, the frasers of the future will be radicalized
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:47:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22325035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballantine/pseuds/ballantine
Summary: You don't talk to Fraser; you listen to him.
Relationships: Benton Fraser & Ray Vecchio, Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	Apocalypse When?

**Author's Note:**

> Some of Fraser's biggest cases had environmental themes and I was thinking: if the show had taken place just a few decades later, I think Benton Fraser would have been radicalized by society's refusal to do anything about climate change. (fun starting point for a fic, amiright)
> 
> This story is also a very, very, _very_ loose adaptation of Apocalypse Now. Because why not. There are accordingly a few lines/references to the film in this fic.

_I'm on a boat, going upriver to confront a madman. Please tell me you've heard this one._

That was the note he left his sister. Dropped it on her desk atop the work laptop he bought her last year in a fit of rare and misplaced optimism. When she got back from her manicure or spa or whatever the hell she was doing that day, she'd either find the note or she wouldn't. But Frannie knew the name of their latest client and could get the details from them if he didn't make it back.

Right, their client: an LLC of a subsidiary of a mining exploration outfit. When the bagman first sat down in his office and laid out just what they wanted Vecchio Investigations to do, Ray had laughed in his face. At his back, the perpetual hum of the delivery cicada hub his office was housed above, below, and _inside_ quieted, all the little machines listening in to catch the joke. Jokes equaled clicks equaled data, but there was nothing trend-worthy about one man asking another to sell out. Talk about old hat.

Still, it felt good to laugh. Gave him a tickle of triumph, a flickering sensation of momentary superiority. He may be small-time, sure, he may bend a rule here and there, but at least he don't take money from guys in suits who go around bombing the last caribou off the face of the planet.

But the bagman was used to getting this kind of response. He obviously didn't take it personal, but he made it personal to Ray – the bagman had a good name on his dirty tongue.

Fraser.

The man barely finished the second syllable of the name before Ray felt his nerves start to seize up, his body preparing to do something drop dead stupid. Call it conditioning or force of habit. With Benny, it was somehow both; see, he'd look at you with all these _expectations_ and before you knew it, you were running over roofs and jumping out of windows to meet them. Then he'd disappear but somehow the expectations remained. A seed planted in the poison soil of your head and you sitting there daring it to grow.

The bagman told him a story about Corporal Fraser – a ridiculous tale but then, they always were – and finished with, “So as you can see, he has quite obviously gone insane.”

“Yeah,” Ray said, nodding gamely. “Obviously insane.”

The bagman said they weren't asking Ray to help them, but to help _him_. Fraser. And they'd pay him 5K a day plus travel to do it.

Ray sat in his dusty cramped office in New Miami and felt the old nerves starting to sputter and fire, sporadic like a miswired fusebox. The physical infrastructure around the signal was broken down, neglected. Shit, Ray's last three cases had been tracking ransomed nudes. And he hadn't seen Fraser in years. He owed him nothing.

He took the job.

* * *

He tried making a go of it, the bowling alley thing. A quiet, hokey civilian life. But it wasn't more than a year before the feeling came creeping up on him – weakness. Every day he sat out the life, he was getting softer and the scumbags were getting stronger.

He thought the paranoia would ease off if he got back into the game a little, so he started a security and investigations outfit, took cases as they came and made the monumentally stupid mistake of trying to hide it from Stella.

Stella used to say Ray liked New Miami because it was a place as screwed up as him. No, that's not right, that's not what she said – what did she say? It was worse than that. Oh, right: in New Miami, Ray could call himself a good man. Pretty much the same thing.

She'd never known him in Chicago, and in the end maybe that context mattered. Or maybe he was just finally getting an objective assessment from someone. In Chicago he was the shadow, the name her annoying ex used when he finally got over her. That must've done something for Ray, he figures now. Some kind of subconscious bias; the Vecchio name a new start for any and all Kowalskis in need of one.

New Miami was a new start for him too – for everyone. It was a glittering modern city. Painfully modern: brand new, in fact. Not a speck of history on it. You went there for the air-conditioned skywalks and drinks specials during hurricane season – unless you were poor, then you went there to work and get out again before they flipped the neons on along the sea wall and hiked the transport tolls.

The first time Iguana men came for him, Ray wondered: if he dies in an evil place, will his soul make it to heaven? Or will he wind up next to his Pop in the corner of someone's eye? Maybe together they'll spend a few decades bothering Frannie.

By the third time Iguana men came for him, he'd stopped wondering and maybe even caring. Stella left not long after that, and he couldn't blame her, he really couldn't.

* * *

It took a few days to get the travel arrangements in order.

Crossing the border on short notice was always a pain; the agents got tetchy when they hadn't verified your identity down to your second cousin once removed, or you didn't file your genome in triplicate. Between the American bozos weighing whether they wanted to let him out and the Canadian bozos fretting over whether to let him in, it was a good 48 hours before Ray got the go-ahead to travel. He'd hate to see the wait times during the peak months.

The red tape let him get away with not thinking too much about the particulars of the job. Frannie also helped with that, in her own way. Even after all this time, it was like she was broadcasting from another planet when it came to Fraser.

“I wish he'd get a proper phone... you have to facetime me as soon as you get there,” she said, spinning in his office chair and definitely, very much _not_ helping him pack. She slammed a foot down and stopped the chair's idle rotation as a thought occurred to her. “Oh, but text me first? You have to give me warning.”

He could feel the wrinkles growing deeper on his face, all his careful moisturizing no competition to its lifelong nemesis, his little sister. He aimed the grimace in her direction. “Warning?”

“Duh, Ray. I want to make sure my hair's right before he sees me.”

He was grateful for her help around the office, he told himself. He really was.

“Frannie, you could look like Medusa herself and Benny would say you look fine. Y'know, before he turned to stone and all.” Not that it meant anything when Benny said a woman looked fine. Not that _he_ meant anything by it.

He went back to staring at his suitcase. He wondered how much he wanted to risk packing a printed gun into Canada. On the surface of things, it didn't sound like a case that needed a gun. But Fraser had a way of smashing the surface of things. Usually with his body.

“You're not really going to Canada armed, are you?” Frannie had come around the desk and stood next to him, eyeing his small arsenal skeptically. “I heard you get, like, banned for life these days.”

“Banned from Canada for life, oh no,” he said, but he didn't really mean it. He liked Canada. It was one of the only places on the planet that still got snow on the regular, and as much as he hated the cold, the Chicago boy in him still missed the idea of a white Christmas.

If only Canada felt the same way about him.

“Are you really going up there to stop him?” she asked, chewing her lip. Serious for once.

He threw the printed gun into the hidden compartment of his suitcase. The rest of the packing went a lot more quickly, mostly because he was bringing almost no clothing along. His silk shirts and fine suits weren't coming; he would have to buy warmer duds when he got over the border.

“Ray?” pressed Frannie. “Are you really going to stop him?”

Working with a sibling could be hell sometimes. Who needed the judgment? And her eyes were the same as his, so this was what he got: his own eyes, staring at him in mounting anger and recrimination.

“Grow up,” he told her, and himself. “He's going to get himself killed, Frannie. You want that? Huh?”

She flinched back and turned away, but he didn't let up, calling after her retreating back, “You wanna hear about some Mountie off his nut getting killed in a corporate drone strike because he wouldn't let a few ducks die? Yeah?”

He ended up going to the airport alone. He dropped the note on her laptop before locking the office.

* * *

New Miami to the Twin Cities to Edmonton. Customs for half a day; they didn't find the gun. Edmonton to Yellowknife, where he caught a float plane to Chesterfield Inlet. Between the quality of service provided by one of North America's last two remaining airlines and the security checks inherent in cross-border travel, it was two full days before he stepped foot outdoors again. And then he had to find which app had a lock on transport in the area and beg his phone to cooperate with hailing a ride.

By the time he fetched up on the doorstep of the marina housing the boat that would take him upriver, he was tired, hungry, and wondering why he ever agreed to leave his little apartment. The world was a mess, and he didn't like having to deal with it. Seemed like someone else's problem; it certainly didn't feel like his.

But he had, miraculously, made it in time. The riverboat was due to depart in seven hours. The marina had no rooms, but it did have a bar and a bartender who was willing to let him pass out on a coach in the backroom.

He threw himself down on the cheap polyester weave and tucked his head into the insulated hood of his new coat. The bartender had said it was ten degrees out, but of course she'd been speaking in Celsius. Ray didn't know what that was in American, but he knew it was colder than anything New Miami ever approached. A chill had taken up residence in his bones like a premonition of more cold to come: on the river, in Fraser's freakish little camp. Warmth was a foreign country he didn't have a visa to enter.

But he drifted off like that: on his side, curled in on himself like an annual plant at the end of fall, knowing its time was up but somehow unprepared for what was coming.

* * *

There were no roads along the Thelon River, and the land it cut through was still largely unpopulated by humans. Though of course, according to Fraser's insane proclamation, certain interests were trying to change that.

The riverboat that was going to take him to Fraser's outpost ran shallow and bore blunt proportions and a tiny, cramped cabin that wasn't for him to use. He'd seen late-century Midwestern pontoons with more space and maneuverability, though he took care not to share his observations with the craggy-faced pilot Phillips, who already looked at Ray like he was considering leaving him to get eaten by muskox on the side of the river.

“Do a lot of trips like this, this time of year?” he asked two hours into the ride.

He'd already paced every foot of the boat's surface and tried reading a book. He wanted to look at his phone but was conserving battery; after texting Frannie he'd arrived in Yellowknife, he'd put it on battery saving mode and shoved it deep into his bag, like he might forget it was there if it was out of sight. He hadn't forgotten.

“Not really,” was the enlightening response. Canadians. None of them had ever taken a liking to him, except Benny.

But to his surprise, Phillips eventually continued, picking the question back up half an hour later, after they'd passed a moose and a large, dense flock of what he was told were razorbill auks.

“Treacherous, this time of year,” said Phillips. He raised a finger and picked fastidiously at his teeth. His eyes remained fixed narrowly on the river ahead. “Permafrost melt is changing the lay of the land, and the satellite imaging can get as good as they want – don't mean it'll tell them what's safe to drive on. Spring melt makes the river run unpredictable. One could easily choose a fork that's sprung up temporarily, thinking it was part of the river, only to end up lost in the Barrens, days from another human being.”

Ray went pale as the man carried on in this vein for a while. He felt the early spring breeze come across the river like the icy fingers of a promised death. He shoved his thickly gloved hands deep into his coat and cleared his throat.

“So – I'm the only crazy fool you've taken out this way this year, huh?” he said, trying to sound like he was joking rather than pleading.

“No, there was another.”

“Really?”

Phillips turned the wheel, bringing the boat in a wide curve around what to Ray's inexpert eyes looked like a very small rock.

“Can't remember his name, exactly,” he said. “Colby? No. Some 'K' sounding name. Man had funny hair, and a funny way of talking. Funnier than you, even.”

An awful weariness descended. Ray looked down the bleak river, eyes tearing up in the cold wind. Here he was, further North than any resident of New Miami had any call to be, having dropped everything in his fine life and come running to save Fraser's bacon and of course, _of course_ he wasn't even the first man on the scene.

“Kowalski?” he demanded, “Was the man's name Kowalski?”

“Might've been,” said Phillips. “He sure was a funny one.”

“Yeah, I'll bet.”

The river stretched on. Whitewater lay ahead; cell signal long behind. Here and there the eroded land bordering the river crumbled away into the water, muddying the current and creating obstacles that took ages to trawl through and around. Occasionally a bird flew overhead in the vast sky, calling out a warning no one could heed.

* * *

That night, stuffed in his bivy sack on the open deck of the boat, Ray couldn't sleep. The stars were like something out of a commercial, and he was annoyed this was his only frame of reference. It had been cloudy every time he went up to Benny's cabin years back (Canada, greeting him with its typical excitement), but he bet Kowalski had seen plenty of starry nights like this when he and Fraser went on their little sledding trip. If Kowalski could even see them without his stupid glasses.

Thinking about Kowalski made him wonder again why he came.

When undercover, part of you is always waiting for everyone to figure it out, to realize you're not who you say you are. But when Ray left the Bookman behind and became only himself again, that feeling didn't go away. It was like a habit, a sick compulsion, something that lingered on the edges of his consciousness when he wasn't paying full attention.

Fraser had been the first person in a long time who thought Ray was a good guy. (It was easier fooling people as a kid, especially when their first object of comparison was his alcoholic loser of a pop.) Fraser was the reason Ray signed on to the undercover gig in the first place. He bought his own press, so sue him; Fraser thought he was good so he better be good, right?

But after they went their separate ways again, after Fraser returned home and Ray made for Florida and they said they'd talk and they tried and then they didn't, and then Stella left him – at some point in there Ray forgot what it was like to have someone think he was good. He didn't realize he'd been hoping for a reminder until now, mummified in a slippery sleeping bag in the middle of the Arctic Circle with a runny nose and numb behind.

Hell of midlife crisis he's chosen to have, he thought.


End file.
